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Submission + - Bank Of England Accidentally E-mails Top-Secret Brexit Plan to the Guardian (theguardian.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The first rule of "Project Bookend" is that you don't talk about "Project Bookend."

In retrospect, maybe the first rule should have been "you don't accidentally e-mail 'Project Bookend' to a news agency", because as the Guardian reports, one of its editors opened his inbox and was surprised to find a message from the BOE's Head of Press Jeremy Harrison outlining the UK financial market equivalent of the Manhattan project.

Project Bookend is a secret (or 'was' a secret) initiative undertaken by the BOE to study what the fallout might be from a potential 'Brexit', but if anyone asked what Sir Jon Cunliffe and a few senior staffers were up to, they were instructed to say that they were busy investigating "a broad range of European economic issues."

Submission + - How Java Changed Programming Forever

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. 'Java’s core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Indeed it was precisely this willingness to not only add but also remove features that made Java so much simpler and easier to learn than other object-oriented C descendants.'

Submission + - Gravitational anomalies beneath mountains point to isostasy of Earth's crust

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Imagine you wanted to know what your acceleration was anywhere on Earth; imagine that simply saying “9.81 m/s^2" wasn’t good enough. What would you need to account for? Sure, there are the obvious things: the Earth’s rotation and its various altitudes and different points. Surely, the farther away you are from Earth’s center, the less your acceleration’s going to be. But what might come as a surprise is that if you went up to the peak of the highest mountains, not only would the acceleration due to gravity be its lowest, but there’d also be less mass beneath your feet than at any other location.

Comment Re:Is anyone else bothered? (Score 0) 95

by UnknownSoldier (#49739489) Attached to: Grand Theft Auto V Keeps Raking In Money

Well, if it works for CEOs then why would people have any problems "justifying" it with games?

It is depressing that you were incorrectly modded troll simply because you asked a really important question about what it means to be human and compassionate.

At the risk of being downmodded, what can you expect from a society that gets barbaric entertainment from watching 2 men beat each other up senseless. Most people would rather waste their lives watching someone else's Unreality crap else such as the Kartrashians and go ape shit over nudity (Oh Noes! We were all born naked! Who knew!) then actually learn something constructive for free.

Yeah, some of us are bothered by the excessive violence. Fortunately we have a choice. Turn it off. Don't play it.

It is the same reason professional athletesget paid millions and teachers get crap pay. Society just doesn't value education. They want (and will pay for) dumb entertainment.

Comment Re:There can be only one. (Score 1) 443

by UnknownSoldier (#49731479) Attached to: Choosing the Right IDE

/Oblg. "The Emacs operating system needs a better editor." :-)

I prefer Vim myself as I feel it is like an extension of my mind; it was written by a programmer for programmers.

Either way, you can't go wrong with Vim or Emacs.

Note: Only immature ob developers get into stupid flame wars over which editor is better. (Hint: They ALL suck; some just suck more.)

Submission + - Australian defence controls could criminalise teaching encryption (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: You might not think that an academic computer science course could be classified as an export of military technology. But under Australia's Defence Trade Controls Act – which passed into law in April, and will come into force next year – there is a real possibility that even seemingly innocuous educational and research activities could fall foul of Australian defence export control laws.

Submission + - What Does Iowa Do With 33 Million Dead Chickens? 2

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Stephanie Strom writes in the NYT that deadly avian flu viruses have affected more than 33 million turkeys, chickens and ducks since December and while farmers in Asia and elsewhere have had to grapple with avian flu epidemics, farmers in the United States have never confronted a health crisis among livestock like this one. Almost every day brings confirmation by the Agriculture Department that at least another hundred thousand or so birds must be destroyed; some days, the number exceeds several million.

Mounds and mounds of carcasses have piled up in vast barns in the northwestern corner of Iowa, where farmers and officials have been appealing for help to deal with disposal of such a vast number of flocks. Workers wearing masks and protective gear have scrambled to clear the barns, but it is a painstaking process. In these close-knit towns that include many descendants of the area’s original Dutch settlers, some farmers have resorted to burying dead birds in hurriedly dug trenches on their own land, while officials weighed using landfills and mobile incinerators. Federal lawmakers from Iowa called on the Agriculture Department to do more to help farmers with the culling and disposal of birds. The federal agency has made tens of millions of dollars available for assistance, and noted that it is deploying hundreds of staff members, including 85 in Iowa. Iowa, where one in every five eggs consumed in the country is laid, has been the hardest hit: More than 40 percent of its egg-laying hens are dead or dying. Many are in this region, where barns house up to half a million birds in cages stacked to the rafters. The high density of these egg farms helps to explain why the flu, which can kill 90 percent or more of a flock within 48 hours, is decimating more birds in Iowa than in other states. “It’s important that we get that done fairly soon and we need landfills to be reasonable in terms of the charges they’re assessing and willing to take these birds,” says US Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack. “But at some point in time we’ve basically got to get rid of these birds because otherwise we’re going to begin to have some other issues in terms of odor and flies and things of that nature that people are obviously not going to want to deal with.”

Submission + - A Turtle Receives the First Ever 3D Printed Titanium Jaw Implant of its Kind

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: A wounded loggerhead turtle showed up in Turkey, with significant damage to its upper and lower jaws. It was taken to the Sea Turtle Research, Rescue and Rehabilitation Center at Pamukkale University (PAU) for help. The PAU team, working with BTech Innovation, was able to make a 3D printed titanium jaw implant for the turtle. The operation was a success, and the patient--the world's first sea turtle to receive a 3D printed implant--is recovering.

Submission + - Why Consumers Hate Us (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: It's not usually an all-encompassing kind of hate. Nor is it typically some form of "I hate you so much I won't have anything to do with you!" category of hate. And rarely is it really a "fear of evil" model of hate.

No, it's much more of a simmering, situationally specific kind of anger. It's mostly (but by no means exclusively) directed at large Internet technology firms, and by proxy at the technologists (like many of you, and certainly me) who either directly or indirectly create, deploy, influence, or otherwise impact the Web and its services as experienced by ordinary, mostly non-techie consumers — who increasingly must use our products whether they really want to or not, at the risk of being left far behind ...

Submission + - What if Windows went open source tomorrow? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by JG0LD
JG0LD writes: Thinking out loud about Microsoft making Windows an open source project is a great way to get your friends and colleagues wondering seriously about your mental health. It’s an idea strange enough to sound practically paradoxical, like “hot ice” or “short Pink Floyd songs.”

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